Serious Moonlight(43)

“Tuck your hair inside your hoodie and make it disappear, Mr. Magician. We still have an hour and a half before our shift. Maybe we’ll spot a car tag number, or something.”

“A car tag number,” he said, incredulous.

“Come on, Nick. Are we solving a GD mystery, or aren’t we?”

A slow grin split his face. “Nora, my dear, you know I can’t resist it when you use profanity.”

“All right, then,” I said, high on adrenaline. “Let’s follow this mother shucker out of the hotel.”





“Danger, like a third man, was standing in the room.”

—Ian Fleming, From Russia, with Love (1957)





14




* * *



One elevator was still in use when we darted down the hallway. We took our chances that Ivanov was inside that one and called up the other. Meanwhile, Daniel texted both the desk clerk and the midshift van driver and asked them to keep an eye out for Mr. Blue Baseball Cap and “a tall Vladimir Putin fucker in a suit.”

By the time we’d made it back down to the lobby, we’d learned three things. (1) Darke and his female companion had left the hotel in a private rideshare that was idling outside at the curb. (2) Ivanov had used express checkout from inside the room—skipping the front desk completely. (3) Ivanov had just left the hotel on foot . . . but not before he asked the porter out front for directions to Pier 54.

That was all we needed. We raced around the corner of the Cascadia, and before you could hum the latest James Bond theme song, we spotted him waiting for a crosswalk light. He was on his phone, using a Bluetooth earpiece.

“Who is this guy?” Daniel said in a low voice.

No idea, but we kept a cautious distance while the man chatted nonstop on his phone, gesturing to no one as he quickly crossed the street. I mentally struck “arms dealer” off my list of possible careers for this guy. Not that I personally knew any, but Ivanov had the aura of a dealmaker. A stockbroker, or a real estate go-between. I hated to let Daniel down, but this big mystery he’d stumbled upon was probably something boring. Maybe Darke was just buying a big piece of property. He was a millionaire. Didn’t they do things like that?

Ivanov ended his phone call waited for the signal before crossing Alaskan Way to the waterfront. As we followed, Pier 54 came into view, which was basically a tourist trap, like all the piers here. This one had a boat charter booth and a couple of sailboats, and a little farther down, Ivar’s Acres of Clams—a Seattle institution I saw every day from the ferry.

“Maybe he’s got a hankering for fish and chips?” Daniel said.

Nope. The man was headed straight for the end of the pier. “Ye Olde Curiosity Shop.”

“Should we go inside?” Daniel asked, glancing up at the darkening sky and the drizzle that was now falling. “Ivanov doesn’t know our faces.”

“And he doesn’t have guard dogs.”

“Fuck it,” Daniel said enthusiastically. “Let’s do this.”

The Curiosity Shop had been one of my favorite places in the city when I was a kid; Mom and I must have come here a hundred times. One-part museum (actual mummies), one-part carnival side show (Fiji mermaid taxidermy hanging from the ceiling), and one-part novelty gift shop (vampire hunter kits), it was a popular tourist attraction. If you wanted a totem pole or a necklace with your name carved on a piece of rice, this was your store. Or you could just browse the glass cases filled with turn-of-the-century oddities.

I hadn’t been in here for years, and the shop itself had moved between a couple of locations on the waterfront, but it smelled the same as I remembered, pleasantly musty. And at the moment, it was moderately crowded; a lot of families with loud kids gawked at an antique hinged educational aid nicknamed Medical Ed.

The crowds were good for us, since we were trying to avoid Ivanov’s attention. He looked around a little, scanning the jam-packed shop, and then made a beeline for the Javari shrunken-head display.

Curiouser and curiouser . . .

Daniel and I pretended to be browsing while we listened in to a conversation Ivanov was having with one of the store’s clerks. “Are these heads real?” he asked in a heavily accented voice.

The clerk answered, “Some of them came from the Heye Foundation in New York before the government banned the trafficking of human remains. A few may be monkey heads. Those were often sold to Northern tradespeople. Monkey or human, the process is still the same—Javari tribesmen in Peru would remove the skull from the back of the head, sew it up, and boil it to shrink it down.”

I puffed up my lips to stop myself from gagging. Daniel pretended to chop my head off with his hand, and I swatted him away.

“However, the heads for sale are made from goatskin,” the clerk informed him, showing him a line of gruesome heads hanging from a pole, each about the size of a fist.

“Fascinating,” Ivanov said. “I have a twelve-year-old son who loves morbid things, so he will be happy if I bring him one back.”

“Where are you from?” the clerk asked.

“Kiev.”

“Is that the Ukraine?”

“Indeed, it is,” Ivanov said.

Not Russian! Daniel and I shared a look.

“That’s a long way away,” the clerk said. “Here on business?”